Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth (25 December 1771 - 25 January 1855) was an English poet, story writer, and diarist. Life Overview Wordsworth was the only sister of Romantic poet William Wordsworth,, and his lifelong and sympathetic companion, and endowed in no small degree with the same love of and insight into nature as is evidenced by her Journals. Many of her brother's poems were suggested by scenes and incidents recorded by her, of which that on Daffodils beginning "I wandered lonely as a cloud" is a notable example.John William Cousin, "Wordsworth, Dorothy," A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1910, 414. Wikisource, Web, Mar. 20, 2018. Dorothy did not set out to be an author, and her writings consist only of a series of letters, diary entries, and short stories. Life Youth Wordworth was the 3rd child and only daughter of (Cookson-Crackanthorpe) and John Wordsworth of Cockcrmouth The poet William Wordsworth was her brother and a year her senior. On the death of her father in 1783, Dorothy found a home at Penrith, in the house of her maternal grandfather, and afterwards for a time with a maiden lady at Halifax.Gosse, 825. In 1787, on the death of the elder William Cookson, she was adopted by her uncle, and lived in his Norfolk parish of Forncett. Adult life and journals She and her brother William, who dedicated to his sister the "Evening Walk" of 1792, were early drawn to one another, and in 1794 they visited the Lakes together. They determined that it would be best to combine their small capitals, and that Dorothy should keep house for the poet. From this time forth her life ran on lines closely parallel to those of her brother, whose companion she continued to be till his death. After she was able to reunite with William firstly at Racedown Lodge in Dorset in 1795 and afterwards (1797-1798) at Alfoxden House in Somerset, they became inseparable companions. The pair lived in poverty at first; and would often beg for cast-off clothes from their friends.Cavendish, Richard. "Death of Dorothy Wordsworth: January 25th, 1855". History Today, Vol. 55, January 2005. From the autumn of 1795 to July 1797 William and Dorothy Wordsworth took up their abode at Racedown, in Dorsetshire. It is thought that they made the acquaintance of Coleridge in 1797. In July of that year they moved to a large manor-house, Alfoxden, in the north slope of the Quantock hills, in West Somerset, Coleridge about the same time settling near by in the town of Nether Stowey. home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth in the Lake District. Photo by Rachel Rodgers. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.]] On 20 January 1798 Dorothy Wordsworth began her invaluable Journal, used by successive biographers of hsr brother, but 1st printed in its quasi-entirety by William Knight in 1897. The Wordsworths, Coleridge, and Chester left England for Germany on 14 September 1798; and of this journey also Dorothy Wordsworth preserved an account, portions of which were published in 1897. On 14 May 1800 she started another Journal at Grasmere, which she kept very fully until 31st December, of the same year. She resumed it on 1 January 1802 for another 12 months, closing on the 11th of January 1803. These were printed in 1889.Gosse, 826. She never married, and after William married Mary Hutchinson in 1802, she continued to live with them. She was by now 31, and thought of herself as too old for marriage. She composed Recollections of a Tour in Scotland, in 1803, with her brother and Coleridge; this was published in 1874. Her next contribution to the family history was her Journal of a Mountain Ramble, in November 1805, an account of a walking tour in the Lake district with her brother. In July 1820 the Wordsworths made a tour on the continent of Europe, of which Dorothy preserved a very careful record, portions of which were given to the world in 1884, the writer having refused to publish it in 1824 on the ground that her "object was not to make a book, but to leave to her niece a neatly-penned memorial of those few interesting months of our lives." Meanwhile, without her brother, but in the company of Joanna Hutchinson, Dorothy Wordsworth had traveled over Scotland in 1822, and had composed a Journal of that tour. Other MSS. exist and have been examined carefully by the editors and biographers of the poets, but the records which we have mentioned and her letters form the principal literary relics of Dorothy Wordsworth. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Dorothy Wordsworth's companionship to her illustrious brother. He has left numerous tributes to it, and to the sympathetic originality of her perceptions. ⁠"She," he said, :"gave me eyes, she gave me ears; :And humble cares, and delicate fears; "A heart the fountain of sweet tears; And love, and thought, and joy." Last years In 1829 she was attacked by very serious illness, and was never again in good health. After 1836 she could not be considered to be in possession of her mental faculties, and became a pathetic member of the interesting household at Grasmere. She outlived the poet, however, by several years, dying at Grasmere on 25 January 1855. Writing A Life by E. Lee was published in 1886; but it is only since 1897, when William Knight collected and edited her scattered MSS., that Dorothy Wordsworth has taken her independent place in literary history. The value of the records preserved by Dorothy Wordsworth, especially in earlier years, is hardly to be over-estimated by those who desire to form an exact impression of the revival of English poetry. When Wordsworth and Coleridge refashioned imaginative literature at the close of the 18th century, they were daily and hourly accompanied by a feminine presence exquisitely attuned to sympathize with their efforts, and by an intelligence which was able and anxious to move in step with theirs. "S.T.C. and my beloved sister," William Wordsworth wrote in 1832, " are the two beings to whom my intellect is most indebted." In her pages we can put our finger on the very pulse of the machine; we are present while the New Poetry is evolved, and the sensitive descriptions in her prose lack nothing but the accomplishment of verse. Moreover, it is certain that the sharpness and fineness of Dorothy's observation, "the shooting lights of her wild eyes," actually afforded material to the poets. Coleridge, for instance, when he wrote his famous lines about "The one red leaf, the last of its clan," used almost the very words in which, on 7 March 1798, Dorothy Wordsworth had recorded "One only leaf upon the top of a tree ... danced round and round like a rag blown by the wind." It is not merely by the biographical value of her notes that Dorothy Wordsworth lives. She claims an independent place in the history of English prose as one of the very earliest writers who noted, in language delicately chosen, and with no other object than to preserve their fugitive beauty, the little picturesque phenomena of homely country life. When we speak with very high praise of her art in this direction, it is only fair to add that it is called forth almost entirely by what she wrote between 1798 and 1803, for a decline similar to that which fell upon her brother's poetry early invaded her prose; and her later journals, like her Letters, are less interesting because less inspired. Publications Poetry *''The Poetry of Dorothy Wordsworth: Edited from the journals'' (edited by Hyman Eigerman). New York: Columbia University Press, 1940; Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970. Non-fiction *''Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A.D. 1803'' (edited by John Campbell Shairp). Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1874; New York: Putnam, 1874. **(edited by Carol Kyros Walker). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. *''George and Sarah Green: A narrative. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1936. Collected editions *''A Dorothy Wordsworth Selection. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1936. *''Dorothy Wordsworth'' (edited by Susan M. Levin). New York: Pearson Longman (Longmans Cultural Editions), 2009. Letters and journals *''Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth'' (edited by William Angus Knight). (2 volumes), London & New York: Macmillan, 1897. Volume I, Volume II. *''Letters of the Wordsworth family from 1787 to 1855'' (edited by William Angus Knight). (3 volumes), Boston & London: Ginn, 1907. Volume I, Volume II, Volume III. *''The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth'' (edited by Ernest de Selincourt) **''The Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 1787-1805''. (1 volume), Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1935 ** The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years. (2 volumes), Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1937 **''The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years''. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1939 **revised and enlarged (by Chester L. Shaver, Mary Moorman, and Alan G. Hill) as The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (5 volumes), Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1967-1988.William Wordsworth 1770-1850. Poetry Foundation. Web, Jan 6. 2012. *''Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth'' (edited by Ernest de Selincourt). (2 volumes), London: Macmillan, 1941. *''Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth: the Alfoxden journal, 1798; the Grasmere journals, 1800-1803''. London, New York, & Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1958. *''Home at Grasmere: Extracts from the journal of Dorothy Wordsworth (written between 1800 and 1803) and from the poems of William Wordsworth'' (edited by Colette Clark). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1978. *''Letters of Dorothy Wordsworth'' (edited by Alan Geoffrey Hill). Oxford, UK, New-York, Toronto, & Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981. *''Dorothy Wordsworth's illustrated Lakeland journals'' (edited by Rachel Trickett). London: Collins, 1987. *''Selections from the Journals'' (edited by Paul Hamilton). Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1992; London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992. *''The Continental Journals (edited by Helen Boden). Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1995.'' Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:Dorothy Wordsworth, WorldCat, OClC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Dec. 15, 2013. Audio / video *''The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth'' (audiobook; with Jenny Agutter as Dorothy Wordsworth). Cornwall, UK: Greenpark Media (Mr. Punch), 2012. See also *List of British poets References * De Selincourt, Ernest. Dorothy Wordsworth: A Biography. The Clarendon Press, 1933. * Gittings, Robert & Manton, Jo. Dorothy Wordsworth. Clarendon Press, 1985. ISBN 0-1981-8519-7 * . Wikisource, Web, Mar. 20, 2018. * Jones, Kathleen. A Passionate Sisterhood: Wives, Sisters and Daughters of the Lakeland Poets. Virago Press ISBN 1-8604-9492-7 * Levin, Susan M. Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism. McFarland and Co., 2009. ISBN 978-0-7864-4164-8 * Macdonald MacLean, Catherine. Dorothy Wordsworth, the Early Years. New York: The Viking Press, 1932. *Wilson, Frances. The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life. Faber and Faber, 2009. Notes External links ;Poems *Dorothy Wordsworth 1771-1855 at the Poetry Foundation *Dorothy Wordsworth at PoemHunter (1 poem: "Grassmere - A fragment"). ;Books * * ;About *"Sister Act: A new take on Dorothy Wordworth" * Cultural and historical edition of Dorothy Wordsworth's works * . Original article is at "Wordsworth, Dorothy" Category:1771 births Category:1855 deaths Category:People from Cockermouth Category:English diarists Category:English poets Category:English women writers Category:Women diarists Category:Women poets Category:William Wordsworth Category:19th-century poets Category:Poets Category:19th-century women writers Category:People from Cumbria